core organizing members

MAY CHew

---

​May Chew is an Assistant Professor at the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema and Department of Art History at Concordia University. Chew collaborates on Houses on Pengarth, a research and curation project centred on developing a socially-engaged, experimental art lab in Toronto’s Lawrence Heights community. Her recent work includes a chapter in the anthology Material Cultures in Canada (WLU Press, 2015); articles in Imaginations, the International Journal of Heritage Studies, the Journal of Canadian Art History; and Public 57: Archives/Counter-Archives, which she co-edited with Susan Lord and Janine Marchessault.

Alice MING WAI Jim

Art historian and curator, Alice Ming Wai Jim is Professor, Contemporary Art, in the Department of Art History, and Concordia University Research Chair in Ethnocultural Art Histories. She is also interim director of the Queer Media Database Canada-Quebec Project and co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Asian Diasporic Visual Culture and the Americas. Her current research is on born-digital ethnic avatars created by Indigenous artists and artists of colour.

Surabhi Ghosh

Exhibition view, 2017, Photo by Guy L'Heureux

Artist and educator, Surabhi Ghosh is Assistant Professor & Program Coordinator, Fibres & Material Practices in the Department of Studio Arts. She is interested in how textiles as a form of media transmit, contain, and shape stories of place and identity. For immigrants—people for whom “place” is no longer stable—how do textiles contribute to their newly complex identities? And how do the descendants of immigrants negotiate their hyphenated cultural identities in relation to these materials?

Angélique Willkie

Lisa Graves

Performer, singer, dramaturge and pedagogue, Angélique Willkie is Assistant Professor in the Department of Contemporary Dance, and co-director of the Performing Arts Research Cluster (LePARC / Milieux Institute for Arts, Culture & Technology). Her current research focuses on the notion of an indiviual corporeal dramaturgy, inspired by the trajectories of performer Josephine Baker and French transgender circus artist Phia Ménard. 

Group Members

Faculty members-at-large

Monika Kin Gagnon Professor of Communication Studies and a Concordia University Research Fellow. She has published widely on cultural politics, memory, and visual/media arts since the 1980s. Her books include Other Conundrums: Race, Culture and Canadian Art (2000), 13 Conversations about Art and Cultural Race Politics (2002, with Richard Fung), and Reimagining Cinema: Film at Expo 67 (2014, with Janine Marchessault).

Designer and educator, Rilla Khaled is Associate Professor in the Department of Design and Computation Artsand director of the Technoculture, Art and Games (TAG) Research Centre, under the Milieux Institute for Arts, Culture and Technology. Her research & creation centres on the design of persuasive and critical/speculative playful media, interactions between games and culture, and practices involved in emerging forms of game design.

Director, writer and animator, Cilia Sawadogo is Associate Professor of Animation in the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema. She has received numerous awards for films she directed at the NFB or independently including L'Arbre aux esprits (2005), La ruse du lievre (2001) Christopher changes his name (1999), Le Joueur de Cora (1996), L'arrèt d'Autobus (1994), Naissance (1993) and La femme mariée à trois hommes (1993).

Media artist and educator, Leila Sujir is Associate Professor of Intermedia (Video, Performance, and Electronic Arts) in the Department of Studio Arts and Principal Investigator and Director of Elastic Spaces, an international Concordia-based research project that explores stereoscopy, 3D video and encompassing virtual and augmented reality.

Luis Carlos Sotelo Castro is the Canada Research Chair in Oral History Performance and Associate Professor in the Department of Theatre.

​Rajni Shah is a Horizon Postdoctoral Fellow at the  Acts of Listening Lab (Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling & Dept of Theatre).

Graduate student members

After graduating with a BA and MA in Art History from the Université du Québec à Montréal, Julie Alary Lavallée completed a BFA in Studio Arts at Concordia University where she is pursuing doctoral studies in Art History. Her current research focuses on national contemporary art exhibitions. Through studies of large-scale manifestations of Indian art presented in the West, the research looks at curatorial endeavors that made visible marginalized artistic productions and identities within official national narratives. A polyglot, independent curator and author, she has been actively involved with Studio XX since 2012 (board of directors and editorial committee of .dpi online journal). In 2018, she joined the Studio XX team as general coordinator. She currently works for the ministère de la Culture et des communications du Québec as regional expert as part of the Politique d'intégration des arts à l'architecture et à l'environnement des bâtiments et des sites gouvernementaux et publics. She is currently involved with AICA Canada.

Nima Esmailpour is an artist, art historian, and the co-founder of the Taklif : تکلیف collective . He graduated from Goldsmiths,(University of London) with an MA in Art and Politics and is currently pursuing a PhD in the Department of Art History at Concordia University. Taklif has produced and participated in numerous critical engagement initiatives, including Common Aliens: Diaspora in Time (Studio XX, Montreal, 2016), Disorienting Diaspora: Shorts by Brown Queer Artists from the Canadian Archive (RIDM Festival, Montreal, 2017), Conversations at the Edge, SAIC, Chicago, 2019), Utopia as Method (Regart, Quebec City, 2018), What is Critical Curating? (RACAR, 2018), Ideas of Femininity (FOFA Gallery, Montreal, 2018), and Syphon 5.1: My life is not your _____. (Modern Fuel, Kingston, 2019). ​

Elizabeth Davis is an MA candidate in the Department of Art History at Concordia University. She received a BA in Art History with a Minor in Political Science from McGill University. Elizabeth current research focuses on fat embodiment, subjectivity and vulnerability and shame in the art of Laura Aguilar and Jenny Saville.

Chiara Montpetit is an MA Art History candidate at Concordia University. She holds a BA from the University of Ottawa with a double major in Art History and Theory, and Italian Language and Culture. In addition to her academic endeavours, Chiara completed internships in both Canada and Italy for various art institutions and associations. Her current research focuses on histories of migration and garment making in Canada, as well as oral histories, photography and installation. Chiara has been the journal assistant for the publication Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas (ADVA) since January 2017

Varda Nisar is an independent researcher, currently enrolled in the PhD Program, Art History at Concordia University. Her research interest revolves around national narratives and how they are disseminated through cultural sites to promote hegemony. Previously, she had been engaged with the Karachi Biennale 2017 as the Head of Educational Program and was the founder of Karachi Children's Art Fest. She is also an Arthink South Asia Fellow, and has trained with the Smithsonian Institute, Washington DC, Spark Arts Festival for Children, Leicester. Besides this, she has been engaged in studying the cultural artifacts of the Silawat Community, who were the original stone masons of the city of Karachi.

Mikhel Proulx's research centres on histories of networked culture. Through studies of art and visual culture, this research finds that communications technologies structure our sense of self and our communities. In an era of so-called ‘social’ media that work to isolate and alienate, Proulx asks what lessons can be learned from a generation of artists concerned with networked communication and social action. Proulx holds a BFA in Drawing from the Alberta College of Art and Design and a MA in Art History from Concordia University. He is the 2015-16 Jarislowsky Foundation Doctoral Fellow in Canadian Art History and a recipient of a Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship. His curated projects have been exhibited across Canada and internationally.

Ashley Raghubir is a graduate student in the MA in Art History program at Concordia University. She holds an Honours Bachelor of Arts in Art History from the University of Toronto (2008). Ashley has worked in the Canadian non-profit and arts and culture sectors, including positions at Ryerson Image Centre and the Art Museum at the University of Toronto. Her research interests are Afrofuturism in contemporary art and public programming as research and pedagogy.

Sanaz Sohrabi is an artist and interdisciplinary researcher who works across moving/still image practices, video and installation to analyze the status of moving image as a gateway to a larger investigation around the role of archives as the materials of times and spaces of spectatorship. Per­form­ing history via memory and animating the pace of memory through desta­bi­liz­ing the residual archives have been at the core of her practice-based research and writing. She received her BFA from the Uni­ver­sity of Tehran College of Fine Arts and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with a merit scholarship. She is currently pursuing a practice-based PhD at the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture. Her doctoral work consists of a series of video-essay, critical text, and multimedia installation concerning the British Petroleum archives, addressing the intersection of colonial modernity and visual economy of oil in Iran. Exhibition and screenings include: Videonale 16 Bonn, Athens International Film and Video Festival, European Media Arts Festival, Fiva 06 Buenos Aires (first prize for short film), Images festival, Centre Clark, and Beirut Art Center, among others. Sohrabi has been awarded numerous fellowships and residency awards such as the Transregional Academy at the American University of Beirut, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, SOMA Summer School Ciudad de México, Est-Nord-Est résidence d’artistes, and Vermont Studio Center, among others. She is a co-curator (along with Sima Kokotovic and Giuseppe Fidotta) of the year-long project “The Politics of Alternative Media” based at the Global Emergent Media Lab at Concordia University, Montréal.  

Kanwal Syed completed her under-graduation as a studio-artist, with major in sculpture from National College of Arts, Pakistan. In 2012, she completed her M.A in Art History from University Sains Malaysia, entitled Caught in The Middle: Socio-Political Imageries in Contemporary Art in Pakistan Post 9/11 (2001-2013). She is the author of two published texts in peer-reviewed international journals. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Art History at Concordia University and recipient of FRQSC research grant 2018.  Her research interests encompass Pakistani Art with an emphasis on shifting artistic representations of female subjectivities in Contemporary Pakistani art discourse post 9/11 and War on Terror.

Jeanne Voizard Marceau is an M.A. candidate in Art History at Concordia University, Tiohtiá:ke (Montreal). Her research currently examines affect theories, digital infrastructures and algorithmic control as they relate to contemporary art practices. She previously conducted research on artistic and media representations of migrant detention and incarceration in Canada, and presented her work in Canada and Germany. Jeanne holds a BFA in Art History from Concordia University, 2015. Her research is supported by the Concordia Fine Arts Faculty as well as SSHRC and FRQSC. She has been a teaching assistant for ARTH 373: Issues in Contemporary Canadian Art: Reinventing the Landscape, ARTH 300: Art Historical Methods, and ARTH 358: Studies in the History of Media Art: Fake News and Screen-based Art. Jeanne co-organized the 2019 Art History Graduate Symposium ‘Communities of Care’. She has previously worked for the KW Institute of Contemporary Art in Berlin, and for the Utopian Union Collective in Berlin. ​

student MEMBERS-AT-LARGE

Raissa Simone Killoran’s PhD research examines how biracial descendants of the Transatlantic Slave Trade engage in performance, theatre, and expressive arts as informed by inter-generational trauma. She investigates biraciality as an aspect of the ongoing inter-generational trauma, studying the psychic effects of offspring and generations conceived through the rape of African slaves by slave masters. Raissa is in her third year of the PhD HUMA, under the co-supervision of Dr. Warren Linds and Professor Willkie.

Artist and curator Swapnaa Tamhane is producing work that explores the notion of drawing as a record of looking as a way to document the presence of the postcolonial body and where the gendered body can be situated in the history of drawing or mark-making, strategies of display, and experiences of looking. Swapnaa has been a Research Fellow with support from the Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute, and an International Fellow with Kulturstiftung des Bundes. Swapnaa is in her first year of the MFA Fibres & Material Practices (Studio Arts) program, under the supervision of Professor Ghosh.

                                                                                                                                                     
​                                                                                                                                                        * * * * *

Additional student interest and participation at both the undergraduate and graduate levels will be enhanced by the already existing inter-university, interdisciplinary Ethnocultural Art Histories Research Group (EAHR) student-led research group, founded by Dr. Jim in 2011, to explore and promote ethnocultural art histories in the Canadian context and to increase the visibility and support of students and faculty from diverse cultural communities. EAHR has organized extra-curricular annual exhibitions, conferences, and a lecture series, as well as collaborations with Montreal galleries and two Artexte Research Residency projects in 2015 and 2017, in which they learnt how to digitally map their own archive of activities (5 Years of EAHR). 


EAHR | Media distinguishes itself from the EAHR student group by (1) its focus on the implications of digital tools for the study and making of research creation by members of ethnocultural communities; and (2) the regular combined involvement of faculty and graduate students in its annual programming.